The Man with Two Eyes is the barely awaited sequel to my immensely unpopular science fiction/Western/paranormal/romance/hard-boiled detective humor book, The sort-of Murder of Fiona Galloway. If the demand for this second book is anything like the first, it’s sure to end up as a doorstop.
I’ve completed the first draft of The Man with Two Eyes. While I await feedback from my critical readers on The White-Silver House, I’m working back through to create the second draft. So here, to whet the appetites of the three people who’ve read the first Nascent Payne mystery, is the first chapter of the second one, The Man with Two Eyes …
Chapter One:
Nascent Payne sat at a little table near the back corner. In the dim light cast by the fireplace and the single candle perched on the bright red gingham tablecloth, his knees glinted from beneath his kilt. His sleeveless “highlander” style shirt was open, revealing a shock of jet-black chest hair and a tantalizing hint of his rippling pectoral muscles.
Fiona sighed when his tattooed biceps bulged as lifted a glass of white wine to his manly, muscular lips.
Payne rolled his eyes.
“Fiona,” he said quietly, “knock it off!” He would have added that pectoral muscles don’t ripple, but didn’t want to say that much just now, just here.
He had to glance down to assure himself he was still wearing khaki pants and olive shirt, as always. Then he tried to refocus on the case. It was supremely distracting when the victim of his last murder case, Fiona Galloway, got into his head.
She was dead, sort of. Through some weird set of circumstances on Hillsdale, her consciousness lived on. Payne thought of her as a ghost, but his mechanic, Robin Flynn, insisted it was science. To prove it, he even rigged up a little device that allowed Fiona to go with them when they left Hillsdale.
And then he’d cobbled together a portable version so she could go anywhere with Payne. This did not sound like a good idea to Payne, but Flynn pointed out that it could be useful to have a companion along that no one else could see. So here he was, on a case, and here she was too. With her romance-novel-inspired thoughts leaking into his head.
He took a sip of his water and set the glass down. He scanned the room again, and tried to look like an ordinary guy waiting for a friend, and not like a private investigator waiting for a murderer while a murder victim’s fantasies played out in his head. Whatever that looked like.
Payne would’ve preferred to do this in a place with a little more light, but he knew this was the kind of place he’d find the man he was looking for. Low-ceilinged, dim and a bit dingy. Frequented by men and women desperate for something, anything, to take them away from their dull, numb, hopeless existence, if only for a short time. And popular with the women and men who serviced them. Cheap liquor, cheap company.
These were the type of women his suspect stalked. Though Payne couldn’t figure out why he killed Helena. It didn’t fit what he’d pieced together about the man, or about Helena. Maybe that was why he was so intent on finding him. It sure wasn’t because the Colonel asked him to.
He settled back to wait. He’d find him. Maybe not tonight, maybe not here. But he’d find the killer.
The man with two eyes.
Want to read the first book? Get it here.
by Ian Fallis 
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